The present invention relates to systems and methods for facilitating communication between mobile Internet users and for facilitating electronic commerce that is tailored to the communicated information. More particularly, the present invention relates to techniques for allowing users of Internet-capable mobile devices to communicate in a manner that takes into account user identity and profile, user status, user present and future/intended activity, user present and future/intended location, and time duration and for allowing merchants to promote goods and services in a more effective manner based on the user's communicated information and behavior profile. As the Internet becomes more accepted and useful, there has been a tremendous amount of interest in endowing mobile devices, such as cellular phones, laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers, and the like, with wireless Internet capability. Emails and access to web search engines are often cited as the two Internet applications that users wish to have access to while being away from their desktop Internet terminal. As manufacturers turn their attention to the wireless Internet market, consortiums and standards have evolved for bringing the power of the Internet to the wireless and miniaturized world of mobile devices. By way of example, technical proposals such as the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and mobile Internet (mobile IP) have received much attention in the press as of late.
As the wireless mobile Internet area is in its infancy and market penetration has been rather low, much of the current attention is directed toward issues involved in achieving an acceptable, data transmission rate, data security, and reliability via the wireless medium and in bringing desktop-type applications, which the users have long enjoyed on their desktop terminals, to the small screen of the typical mobile device. However, there has been less attention to other important implications of wireless Internet access, particularly implications that do not apply to stationary, desk-bound Internet users.
It is reasoned by the inventor herein that one implication of wireless Internet computing is that the mobile user's location may dynamically change with time as the mobile user moves about during his day. Since his Internet access is through a portable mobile device, the mobile user essentially carries the whole Internet with him from location to location. Accordingly, wireless mobile Internet access is capable of a whole range of applications vastly different from those applicable to stationary, desktop Internet access. With convenient mobile Internet access, the user may readily update his information to the Internet as well as utilize the Internet to search for information pertaining to other users, for example. For mobile Internet users, time and location become very important dimensions of the communication experience.
Furthermore, it is expected that mobile users will utilize wireless Internet access in a manner that is more integrated with their daily routines than their deskbound counterparts. Because of the small size, convenience, and portability of the portable Internet access devices, it is expected that mobile users will integrate Internet technology into their daily activities in ways that are simply not possible before. By way of example, a user employing an Internet-capable cellular phone may have Internet access while shopping, commuting, dining, strolling about town, and the like. It is expected that mobile Internet users will access the Internet to receive information, to communicate, to engage in electronic commerce, and the like while moving about handling their day-to-day chores. In contrast, deskbound users, because of the lack of mobility of their Internet access, are typically restricted to accessing the Internet only when at home, in the office, or at a location where Internet access through a desktop terminal may be found.
Two of the most challenging but potentially useful areas in wireless mobile Internet access involve mobile user coordination and electronic commerce. Mobile user coordination refers to time-dependent, activity-dependent and/or location-dependent coordination among individual mobile Internet users to enable them to coordinate in order to participate in a certain activity or accomplish a certain goal, either in the present time or at some future point in time. By way of example, a mobile Internet user may wish to coordinate an impromptu gathering with selected friends and may wish to use the Internet to both gather information about the friends' availability, current location, and/or current/planned activities and to invite the friends to meet at a specified location at a specified time. As another example, a mobile Internet user may indicate that he intends to be at some particular place in the future and invite/instruct others to meet at the same place. As yet another example, a mobile Internet user may be interested in a certain activity (e.g., shopping, playing tennis) at some specified location at some specified time (either in the immediate future or at some specified time in the future) and may employ the Internet to publish his intention to invite either selected others or anyone interested to participate.
Electronic commerce based on user location and activity information is another area that merchants are highly interested in. If the user past, current, and future activity and location are known, such information in conjunction with the user's behavioral and/or purchasing profile may allow a merchant to more precisely tailor the offering of their products or services and communicate such offering to the user to maximize the chance of purchase.
In the current art, users may attempt to employ emails to inform others of his coordination effort. However, even if emails become widely accessible by mobile Internet users, there are drawbacks to using emails for mobile user coordination purposes. For one, emails owes it popularity partly to the fact that it allows the user to attend to the emails only when convenient. The rest of the time, the received emails sit patiently in the receiver's mailbox, waiting to be read. However, this manner of use is incompatible with mobile user coordination of events that are location-dependent and are perishable with the passage of time. By the time the recipient gets around to reading his email, the time for the event may have already passed. Additionally, email is a “push” medium, which intrudes into the recipient's daily routine. This is particularly disadvantageous to mobile phone users who may wish to be notified with an audible warning (such as a ring) as soon as an email arrives.
Furthermore, email communication is intrusive in that it presumes that the recipients wish to receive and review the information sent by the senders. In fact, most Internet users nowadays are deluged with emails, most of them may even be well-intentioned, all of which require an undue amount of time every day to review and respond. Users resent this and for many users, the response has been to filter emails, either manually or automatically, so that only the urgent emails (e.g., those from superiors, loved ones, or work-related) are attended to right away and the rest ignored until a convenient time (such as at the end of the day or on weekends). Again, this manner of use is also incompatible with the needs of mobile user coordination pertaining to events which may be location-specific and time-sensitive.
Furthermore, unless a user sends out an email or responds to one, email communication does not allow others to query for one's availability, current location, mood, intended activity, location in the future, etc. without being intrusive. By way of example, a user cannot readily inquire about the current location or availability of another user without sending an email and requesting a reply or in some manner require a response from the other user, who may be busy or simply uninterested in the reason for the inquiry.
Additionally, email content tends to be free-form and is thus difficult for merchants to easily utilize the information contained therein for the purpose of determining the user's location, present and intended activity, and the like. Since such information is of great interest to merchants, the difficulty of ascertaining such information from free-form email communication is a drawback. Additionally, the free-form nature of email also renders it less convenient as a communication tool for mobile Internet users. This is because most mobile Internet users loath to enter free-form data on the miniaturized keyboard/handwriting recognition pad that are furnished with most mobile Internet devices today.
With regard to the need to furnish time-relevant location information for mobile Internet users, it has been proposed that the user's current location can be tracked using location-finding technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS). In fact, it has been proposed that GPS circuitries be incorporated into mobile Internet devices in the future. However, there are drawbacks to such a proposal. For one, GPS tracking seriously threatens the privacy of the user of the GPS-enabled mobile Internet device since it renders it possible to track the user at every instant. For most users, this is the equivalent of being followed throughout the day and is simply an unwelcomed intrusion. The integration of GPS technology into mobile Internet devices also involves additional power requirement, complex circuitries and costs, both for the mobile Internet devices and for the transmission networks that handle them. As the majority of mobile Internet devices, as well as their support infrastructures, are not GPS-enabled today, it is also not possible to offer services based on GPS technology until a sufficient number of users and service providers have upgraded their equipment to work with GPS.
Still furthermore, although location-finding technologies such as GPS can track a given user's current location, no information is available about that user's current activity, future activity, intended future location at a specified time, and/or availability/willingness to participate. Yet, these are some of the pieces of information that may be very useful in a mobile user coordination application.
Group calendar programs are another class of desktop application programs that may conceivably be used for coordinating mobile users. However, most group calendar products are directed toward small, closed groups, i.e., groups whose members are known and/or formed in advance to further a particular goal such as employees of a business. The available group calendar products are, for the most part, ill adapted for use via the Internet wherein the number and identity of users may not be known in advance and wherein the range of activities proposed may be infinite. By way of example, most group calendar programs are not well adapted for allowing previously unknown users to sign on and perform searches and for allowing the users to control the privacy settings for individual items of information about themselves. As another example, group calendars tend to work by posting information on calendars of others, a paradigm that is unsuitable when the size of the group that a user wishes to gain expose to may be as large as the Internet community itself. In fact, most group calendars become unmanageable when the size of the group become too large and the sheer volume of calendared events overwhelm most users (giving rise to a problem not unlike the spam email problem). This paradigm also tends not to work well on the miniaturized screens of most mobile Internet devices, which render it difficult to view a large amount of displayed data.
Additionally, because calendar products tend to be employed by users to plan their day and activities, the majority of which involve private activities and typically do not include other users, most of the entries therein are inapplicable for use in mobile user coordination applications (which, by design, are directed toward sharing information among mobile users). Also, daily calendar information (versus posted information designed to invite participation by others) is typically considered highly private by most users, and a user tend to be reluctant to disclose such information to others (which partly explains the relative lack of use of such products nowadays and where they are used, only for work-related purposes and work-related entries among small, known group of people). Because most people tend to associate a greater degree of privacy with their calendar entries, using calendar information for the purpose for promoting goods and services by merchants may provoke an unduly negative reaction among users.
A case can be made for maintaining multiple calendars, one of which could be designated for public/semi-public access so that other users can review the calendared information for the purpose of deciding whether they wish to participate. However, such a solution tends to be impractical as users typically do not want to have to keep track of which calendar to use for which purpose since the goal of using a calendar, after all, is to centralize information in one location for the purpose of planning one's day.
Furthermore, most group calendar products are not well adapted to the needs of mobile Internet users, who inherent characteristics is constantly changing location. This is hardly surprising since group calendar products were developed primarily for the desktop Internet users. Furthermore, most group calendar products also involve unstructured data entry, which tends to be less attractive for mobile Internet users who, as mentioned earlier, have to contend with the limited screen space and keyboard/handwriting recognition pad of their mobile Internet devices. Still further, the group calendar products currently available, being developed for desktop computers, tend to require a large amount of memory, permanent storage, and processing power to run. Most of these programs exist as executable codes permanently stored on the desktop computers. Permanent and random access memory, as well as computing power and battery life, are of course limited resources on mobile Internet devices, thus rendering the current generation of group calendar products unsuitable for use on the mobile Internet devices. Instant messaging, which is a technology developed when Internet access was primarily accomplished via desktop terminals, also suffer many of the same deficiencies. Through instant messaging, it is now possible to inform other users of the user's current activity and availability. However, instant messaging as it is currently implemented does not account for the mobile nature of users (as would be the case when users access the Internet wirelessly via mobile Internet devices) or the time-dependent nature of the activities involved. For example, there is no established facility within instant messaging to allow users to invite others to a planned activity happening at some predefined time in the future at some predefined location (or allow others to search for the same). Instant messaging applications also require downloading executable codes, a requirement that is typically unwelcomed by users of the mobile Internet devices who are constantly challenged with doing more with less power consumption, and less computing and memory resources.
Because of these shortcomings, these technologies, which were developed when desktop Internet access were the predominant mode of access, do not adequately serve the needs of the mobile Internet users. As front-ends for electronic commerce applications, they also have many deficiencies. In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for allowing mobile Internet users to communicate for the purpose of coordinating activities and to allow merchants to employ user identity and behavior/shopping profile, user status, user present and future/intended activity, user present and future/intended location, and/or time duration in the promotion of goods and services.